Page 328 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Grindlay, Alejandro Luis. Huertas-Fernández, Miguel. Molero-Melgarejo, F. Emilio.

1. Introduction

The traditional isolation of Eastern Andalusia Giving the topographical difficulties of this area
they have produced the traditional isolation of Eastern Andalusia with the rest of the country.
They have traditionally defined the natural existing corridors which have also established a
clear distribution of the territorial crossroads as can be appreciated in a first geographical
approximation. See Figure 1.

Although the whole region has an equilibrated and integrated in the rank-size model urban sys-
tem, and all the provincial capitals have a certain metropolitan structure, as it is presented in
the Territorial Regional Spatial Plan (COPT, 2006). See Figure 2.
This paper will consider the rail lines in Eastern Andalusia which comprises the four eastern
provinces: Almeria, Granada, Jaen and Malaga. To complete and to give coherence to our study
the cities of Algeciras (120,600 Hab.), in the province of Cadiz, and Cordoba (328,300 Hab.) will
also be considered. The line between Cordoba and Malaga (569,000 Hab.) could be considered
the limit between Western and Eastern Andalusia. Within these provinces their capital cities
and their main populations, their connections to the regional and national capitals –Seville
(690,600 Hab.) and Madrid (3,166,000 Hab.)- and the eastern connection to Murcia (441,000
Hab.) will be considered.
Despite the traditional underdevelopment situation of the rail lines in Eastern Andalusia, the
current scenarios and projects of the new high-performance rail lines allow new perspectives
of future territorial development linked to them to be drafted. The former, present and future
situations of the rail lines will be considered to evaluate their territorial effects.
Regarding these territorial effects it is necessary to pay attention to the multiple scales to be
considered that have been tested in a previous work over this territory (Huertas, 2013), and to
the diverse territorial dimensions. However in this paper, given the limitation in extension, they
will be focused on the spatial implications of the inter-urban relations at a sub-regional scale.

Figure 1. Territorial corridors and crossroads in Eastern Andalusia. Source: Huertas (2013).

326 360.revista de alta velocidad